The Bart De Wever who appeared on television for his victory acceptance speech today looked like a well-tailored, lean and mean member of the elite rather than some slouchy, overfed and lower class meatball. His opponents would be well advised to treat him with the utmost seriousness. Read on…
Author: gilbertdoctorow
Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write.
Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975).
After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility.
From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University.
Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.
Les voyages informent la vieillesse: Travel notes from Istanbul
Once known for its cosmopolitanism and thriving ethnic Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities which all disappeared in the midst of ethnic cleansing of the 1950s, Istanbul has taken on a new sophistication very different from what it lost but equally authentic. Read on…
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Finland, Oy, Oy, Oy! Travel Notes from Karelia
One’s perception of Finland always depended on where you were coming from…and going to. That truism remains, while in the post-Cold War era everything else one might say about the country and its people has changed. Read on….
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Second Open Letter to MEP Guy Verhofstadt
Since MEP Guy Verhofstadt persists in his folly and plays the cat’s paw to the US State Department in its anti-Russian, hegemonic policies, I return to my admonition to him published on this site on 12 March 2012. Perhaps I was too gentle, and he did not get the point. So let’s be more direct this time: the right honorable gentleman is giving the European Parliament a bad name by his antics. Read on….
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George Kennan and the Russian Soul: Issues from the authorized Kennan biography by John Lewis Gaddis
John Gaddis’s authorized biography of the leading American statesman and public intellectual of the second half of the 20th century, George Kennan, puts in focus current debates over the realist versus idealist management of international affairs, as well as over what personality types are best suited to policy planning versus diplomatic assignments. Read on…
A response to Timothy Naftali’s ‘George Kennan, Michael McFaul, and their Paranoid Hosts’ in Foreign Affairs magazine
John Lewis Gaddis’s biography of American statesman and scholar George Kennan published in 2011 has brought into new currency the life and thinking of one of the nation’s most extraordinary public figures of the 20th century. In the latest online edition of Foreign Affairs magazine, Naftali takes the new interest in the man who was the only US Ambassador to Russia to be declared persona non grata and find points in common with the plight of the incumbent ambassador Michael McFaul. There is indeed plenty of commonality, but not in the sense Naftali adduces. Read on…
Rebuttal: “The End of the ‘Reset’. Why Putin’s Re-Election Means Turbulence Ahead” by Andrew C. Kuchins, Foreign Affairs, March 1, 2012
The political science community in the United States has divided opinions on Iran, divided opinions on China, but is lined up like so many ducks in a row in its (mis)understanding of Russia. In what follows, a contrarian speaks out against the latest wrong-minded take on Putin’s political agenda in Foreign Affairs magazine…..
An Open Letter to Guy Verhofstadt
Universal geniuses do not exist in nature, as Guy Verhofstadt’s ill-informed and wrongheaded remarks on the electoral victory of Vladimir Putin demonstrate amply. Read on…
Russia Votes, 4 March 2012: The Information War
On this day when Russians go to the polls to elect their President for the coming 6 years, of one thing we can be certain: whatever the plurality that Vladimir Putin may obtain (as projected by the most authoritative polls this past week), Western media will find reason to discredit the process for the sake of repudiating his authority and undercutting Russia’s place in the world. If, most improbably, he fails to win outright in this first round of voting, the howls of delight will echo from Whitehall to Foggy Bottom and in many chancelleries in between…Read on
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Russia and European Energy Security: The Inevitable Intrusion of Geopolitics
All aspects of Europe’s relations with Russia including the energy dimension inevitably have a strong geopolitical overlay which at times becomes distorting beyond recognition. To put it in terms of everyman’s anecdotal Freud: here we have a cigar which is never just a cigar. Read on….
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